Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-physics-1-paper-of-the-university-of-oxford/2019-resit/9/solution
Past exam of the physics 1 paper of the University of Oxford 2019 resit 9 Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-25
For a particle of rest mass and velocity , the relativistic energy and momentum areFor a photon of wavelength travelling along ,Here is Planck constant and is the speed of light.
Let and be the incident and scattered photon energies. The stationary electron initially has energy . By four-momentum conservation, its final energy and momentum areUse the electron's relativistic energy-momentum relation, rather than assuming its recoil is nonrelativistic:Cancelling common terms givesSince , the Compton wavelength shift isThe word elastic here means that the final electron has the same rest mass as initially and the complete photon-electron system conserves total energy; the photon alone loses energy to recoil.
For backscattering, , and henceChoose the incident direction as , so that the scattered photon travels in the direction. An observer moving with velocity meets that photon head-on. The Lorentz transformation of four-momentum gives the observed energyThis is the approaching-observer relativistic Doppler effect. Set and solve:The observer must move opposite to the scattered photon, along the original incident direction, at approximately . Moving with the scattered photon would redshift it instead.
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